CANDID: Dr Ajit Sacheendran recently held awareness seminars at local community schools. Photos by Umer Nangiana
By Umer Nangiana
Even Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison had it. Learning disability is no ailment; rather it may be a cover hiding greater abilities.
Children facing this medical condition need just a little extra attention; not because they are incapacitate but because their untapped abilities are too precious for the world to lose.
Experts believe it is social behaviour that gets in the way of discovering talent, and it is the same societal conduct that can take the lid off the hidden talent.
Dr Ajit Sacheendran, a rehabilitation practitioner, professional special educator and psychologist from India, is helping the members of society, particularly teachers and parents, to better understand the symptoms when a child encounters learning disability
and then how pull him or her out of it.
At his school, Vigyan Valley, one of its kinds in the whole of Kerala, India, Dr Ajit helps teachers and parents, the two most important players, to manage learning disability and how to handle children suffering from this condition and together they help their students to integrate into the social stream just like other members.
Teachers at schools, he says, are the most important entities in the fight against learning disabilities. However, they need awareness and sensitisation in dealing with the issue so that they know how to address it when confronted.
“Learning Disability is a condition that affects a child’s ability to learn. It is a neuro-developmental disorder which has very clear biological origin. It affects the brain’s ability to perceive, understand and process information, both accurately and efficiently,” says Dr Ajit while talking to Community.
He was recently in Doha and held several teacher-and-parent sensitisation seminars in different community schools. All skills required by a child to efficiently learn in a class room set-up are mostly affected in this condition. It manifests in difficulty with reading, writing, spelling and learning basic maths, facts, even the number concepts.
Dr Ajit, who is trained in dealing with learning disability from Australia, says in about 60-70 percent cases, it is genetic and in the remaining 30 percent it is acquired. Prematurity and low-birth weight is often associated with learning disability, however, not that every child born pre-mature will have it but the chances are about 60 percent.
“This is a huge number of children that we are talking about. Global statistics show around 5-15 percent of school going children are suffering from this condition. Learning disability happens to be the most commonly seen handicap in a child,” says the psychologist.
The major problem, he says, is that the community is not sensitised to the fact that there is a problem. And learning disability is a hidden handicap, there are no external features. You cannot just look at a child and understand that the child has a learning disability.
A child with learning disability looks like any other child. There are no external markers. And this is why these children mostly go unidentified or the problem unrecognised at the end of the parents and teachers.
Identification is done by the teachers at the first level. When they start teaching the child and observe that a class 2 or 3 child is reading like an Under-KG child or is writing like a class one student, this is when the red flags should go up.
“We rely on teachers to identify because they are the best people to identify these children at an early age and this is one reason why we target teachers for sensitisation purposes so that they do not miss out these children,” says Dr Ajit.
The interest here is to not identify and label the child but to identify and start providing help so that it does not become a serious issue by the time the child gets into a higher grade, he explains.
The psychologist says there are no medical tests, blood tests or neurological tests that could tell us that a child has this condition. The assessments are psychological and educational.
“It is largely a medical condition, yes, because it is a disability but then the problem is 90 percent educational. So we usually do the educational and psychological assessments to find out if a child has this condition and the interventions are by and large educational, too,” says the expert.
And this is why they always go back to schools for intervention because the child has to learn through the education provided by the school and that becomes the ideal environment in which help can be provided.
To make diagnosis, there are certain criteria provided by World Health Organisation and certain methods used in the United States with the help of DSM4 and DCM5 with clearly written out guidelines.
The psychologists making such diagnosis are also cautioned not to jump to conclusions.
“We are not supposed to diagnose Learning Disability based on one singular assessment. Multiple sources of information have to be taken into consideration and you are also required to wait for a couple of years before you decide whether it is really learning disability,” Dr Ajit says.
This centre, he says, was established by fathers, who had a common worry that their children had learning disability and the system was not taking care of it. Dr Ajit has prepared the blueprint on how exactly the school should be run.
At the school, they teach national open school curriculum which is equivalent to CBSE, ICSE and any other system. They believe it is the most helpful way in which a child with a learning problem can learn. They have small classrooms with only 12-15 children. Now, on parents’ insistence they have also started 7 and 8 standards in addition to the existing 9 to 12 standard.
Whether inclusion or seclusion is the right approach to treat learning disability, Dr Ajit says the parents should have all options available and they should decide.
“There are countries which have strictly gone on the mode of inclusion where everything is taken care of by the regular schools. It has worked in some countries, while not in others. In those countries they have gone back to the system of special centres,” says the psychologist.
“Ours is a transition school because if they do not have this option, their education stops there. They would not pass class 10 or even if they do, class 11 and 12 is a distant dream. But these are children, who have the potential to learn and they need to get into college,” explains the doctor, adding that if the children cannot do it the conventional way, they need another plan and Vigyan Valley fits in well to fulfill that gap.
All their students at the valley have entered college. First and second batches of students have already finished their degree programmes and entered the work stream. The others are pursuing different courses in different colleges across India and some even in Dubai.
“I tell my teachers not to teach the subject but to teach children, see them as live children who have their strengths and weaknesses. When you focus too much on the subject you are teaching, the person at the receiving end loses importance,” cautions Dr Ajit.
At their small sized classroom, everything starts visually. Even the notes are schematically represented so that child has something visual to back up what he is otherwise learning theoretically.
Portions are finished quickly and from January to March every year, the children are taught how to write examination. By the time they sit for exams, they have neither anxiety nor are they ill-prepared.
In Qatar, Dr Ajit says, he has seen that both parents and school communities require help. “They are starved for information, they have the right attitude, they simply do not know what to do, they need constant back up and support,” observes the expert.
He says establishing a centre that would provide the expatriates the kind of support they require is essential.
He is coming back to Doha in September this year for a series of workshops for parents on remedial measures to be taken once their children are diagnosed with learning disability.
